NCAA Division I men’s college basketball victories under Bobby Knight’s belt, 3rd-most all time

Legendary basketball coach Bobby Knight entered a ballroom at the Hilton Bayfront in downtown San Diego to a standing ovation, which he quickly stopped.

“Never clap until the guy’s done because you may have clapped for a moron without knowing it,” Knight said to laughter from the audience at the 2013 Response Expo, which is hosting 3,000 people in the infomercial and product-promotion business. The three-day event ends today.

Knight, who coached Indiana University to three national championships, is known for his abrasive personality, short temper and throwing a chair onto the basketball court during a game. He’s also known for a 98 percent graduation rate and the ability to get the most out of those he leads.

Knight, 72, who recently published a book called “The Power of Negative Thinking,” spoke to the audience Tuesday about why it’s good to stay levelheaded in the workplace and take time to consider major decisions rather than just say yes.

“In my coaching career, the word that I felt most strongly about, was the word ‘no,’ ” Knight said. “How long has it been since you would have said ‘no’ that would have enabled you to be better off? ‘No’ is the most important word in our language.”

Knight was asked about his high graduation rate, and said if a student-athlete cut class, he would have to run stairs for two hours. In an office, an employee who slacks off can’t be forced to run stairs, but Knight said the person in charge has other options, including doing the task himself.

“Say, ‘Hey, this isn’t satisfactory.’ I don’t think that I can let you improve your free-throw shooting unless I say something to you. Unless I stay after. Unless I show you something you’re doing wrong in your free-throw shooting,” Knight said. “But then, we’ve got a time limit on this. We can only stay with improvement so long. And now we’re hurting everybody else.”

In addition to his advice on leadership, Knight shared some memories of his nearly 50-year coaching career in which his teams won 902 games. Some of the highlights:

• Knight coached Mike Krzyzewski at the United States Military Academy in the late 1960s. Krzyzewski, now the head coach of Duke (often referred to as Coach K), apparently could not shoot. So Knight warned him, “If we get in a game and the game is tied with two seconds to go and you have the ball, I want you to hold it so we can get into overtime. ... It’s important to explain to people what they can do and what they can’t do.”

• Knight declined an audience member’s request to predict who would advance from this weekend’s Final Four, or who would win Monday’s National Championship game. “If I was capable of telling you who was going to win, I wouldn’t be here. ... I’d be walking in the door and saying ‘(gosh darn it) Obama what are we doing today?’ ”

• Knight said he’d never want to coach in the NBA because “I never thought a player was worth more money than I was.”

• The best basketball player he ever saw talent-wise was Michael Jordan (whom he coached to a gold medal on the 1984 U.S. Olympic team). Knight said Bill Russell was the most valuable to ever play because he won a combined 13 NBA and NCAA championships.